10 ms·

Advice from a 19 Year Old Girl and Software Developer

97 points by carlchenet 9y ago

llamaz 9y ago
I live in Australia where by default, you don't have to pay for university right away (you have to pay the government back slowly once you start earning above a certain salary). As a result it's common for people to do double degrees over a long time, and universities usually don't care how long it takes you to do them. I went down the opposite path than that described in this post - into electrical engineering and math, and 5 years down the line I feel like have no practical skills (there's an emphasis on theory and the fundamentals), and feel that I'm wasting my twenties being stressed out, abusing caffeine, and pulling all nighters every week. I've been working hard on academics since I was 16 (I'm 22 now) this blog post reads like a fantasy of mine.
- alexkavon 9y ago
  It's a possibility, have you tried taking a few years off and testing the other methods you have in mind?
- electricbanana 9y ago
  On the bright side if you did electrical engineering and math in uni then you probably know a lot about matrix math and numerical and iterative approaches to solving equations that do not have elementary solutions. You might be able to apply those to graphics programming or data science.
- xiphias 9y ago
  If you enjoy problem solving, coding is easier than math, I wouldn't be worried about that. Also it's easy to get programming job with math / EE degree (just ask any friend of yours to give a reference). Being stressed is a much bigger problem than being a few years at academy (which is I think still a great thing, as long as it helps problem solving skills). Health is exponentially getting worse as you get older, which means that you don't feel the damage that you do to yourself under 30.
lancebeet 9y ago
It would be prudent to point out that not going to university when you are 19 isn't as much of a life-altering decision in Sweden as it is elsewhere; many choose to attend university later (when they've worked for a couple of years or when they have kids), and it's still possible to get into the top universities.
- _nalply 9y ago
  This is true for much of Europe I believe. Case in point: myself. Being Deaf I didn't manage University in the nineties. However I have been lucky to get a second chance at the University of Applied Sciences to graduate as an engineer, a Dipl. Ing. FH 2006. And now, 2017, I graduated as a legal, a Bachelor of Law, too, and could do this part-time. So it seems at the age of 19 it is perhaps wise not to attend university yet. So young you still don't know what you do the best.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  If you have a safety net (wealthy parents, personal wealth, strong social welfare), it's not really a life-altering decision anywhere.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Yeah, but I think the point is that in Sweden you don't need to have wealthy parents or personal wealth.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      Same in NL, although the government support has been slimmed down a lot and it's no longer offered if you're over 30, the assumption probably being that by then you make enough money to pay for an education on your own.
    - gaius 9y ago
      ... to go and live for a few months in a foreign holiday destination while taking an expensive private course? I call shenanigans. You need to be rich for that anywhere.
danesparza 9y ago
Solid advice. I've been in this business 25 years (also didn't finish college!), and for folks just getting into software development, this is the article that will be recommended reading. Sidenote: I was surprised by the absence of a Github reference in the article. I like to follow influential devs on Github.
lecgo 9y ago
Is she a blue collar programmer?
jonheller 9y ago
I'm shocked that there's an entire mini industry of sorts of pictures of younger woman posing in front of Javascript code. Not just a casual picture but with what looks like a carefully composed photograph.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  Are you referring to more than just the author's Instagram photos in her post?
  - jonheller 9y ago
    Yes. I mean, I still think it's kind of odd to have an entire Instagram feed of just pictures of yourself in front of code. But somehow Instagram's algorithm decided to show me tons of these types of pictures in the "Explore" tab. A huge amount were, like another commenter mentioned, girls in yoga pants or short shorts posing with Sublime Text in the background. And they're hugely popular. In no way do I think the original poster's feed is like this. She seems genuinely interested in coding. It just led me into this entire apparent subculture of this type of thing.
    - bookmarkacc 9y ago
      Your explore page is based on accounts you interact with most. So those posts are a reflection of what you are saving, liking, viewing
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Lon7 9y ago
  I'm not at all surprised that there are women who code and want to share that with others. I'm thrilled that there is more and more of this type of stuff on Instagram. This is how we reach audiences we normally wouldn't.
- deleted 9y ago
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corpMaverick 9y ago
Just a word of caution. I see people in FB advocating against college and academic knowledge in general. (E.g. Einstein flunk math(not true), Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish College, etc.) Sure, If you are really, really smart like Gates, Zuckerberg, or Micheal Dell and you have a killer idea. Don't waste your time in college. But for most moderately smart people college is the best choice. Also if high school was too hard for you, and you don't like school any way, don't waste your time in college and learn a trade. This woman seems very mature and motivated. She is growing without going to college. So it may be the right choice for her. But it will not be the right choice for most people.
- jonathanstrange 9y ago
  I'd like to add to this another word of advice. I'm only a hobby/shareware programmer with no experience in the software industry and it also depends on the country, but generally speaking in many countries and many professions not having an official degree can mean less long-term career chances and a risk of earning less money than less competent colleagues with fancy degrees for the rest of your life. My general advice is to get a good degree for your dream job and to work on a portfolio that illustrates that you're also practically good at it at the same time. Don't fall prey to the false dichotomy trap.
- gr3yh47 9y ago
  >But for most moderately smart people college is the best choice. I just don't think this is true anymore, given the financial burden of modern academic education and the fact that they teach so little useful skills programming is increasingly a trade, and can definitely be self taught better than any college will teach it. the rest of the education may have other value but IMO not worth the time + money + opportunity cost
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    The value of a college education isn't purely economic, but the salaries of graduates are still, in aggregate, higher than those of non-graduates.
Lon7 9y ago
I think an important thing your average non-cs grad developer can learn from her story is the importance of networking. Maybe networking isn't the quite the correct term. But she put herself out there starting at 15, wrote and shared what she did. I'm sure she made a lot of contacts, even if only through the internet. She created an image for herself. Without that there is nothing to set you apart from everyone else in your situation. So it's not surprising that she had multiple recruiters reaching out to her during bootcamp. Good for her.
peterwwillis 9y ago
I followed pretty much an identical path 14 years ago. Here's what I've learned. Yes, she's right that you don't need a lot of school to develop the trade skills of programming or other tech work, and people will hire you. However, it can easily replace the time when young people normally used to develop social skills and potentially critical future relationships (personal and professional). It's also easy to fall down the rabbit hole of learning as much as you can about technology and abandon all other pursuits, because you no longer have the outside influences found in a traditional education system. This limits your exposure to alternative ways of thinking, which at the very least limits effectiveness in your career (a creative one) to say nothing of stunting personal growth. My biggest regret is not learning more about the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Myceneans and Minoans, and Egyptians and Chinese, when their foundational achievements could have inspired me in both my personal and professional life. Learning languages is great too as it exposes new kinds of culture and different ways of thinking. I'm not saying this is a bad path to take - it worked for me! - but I wish someone would have told me all the things I was missing, or provided some sort of path to experience the rewarding parts of it.
- jlebrech 9y ago
  you can learn about greeks and romans quite easily in your spare time, they wrote a lot of books.
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    Yes, I've been aware of that for a long time, but thank you for the information.
matte_black 9y ago
When deciding whether or not you should go to college, always look at the big picture and weigh your options. The kind of work you do in your early twenties probably doesn't require a college education or a strong network of college educated peers, so initially it will seem like you are getting by just fine. But what about your 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond? No one needs to go to college for coding because coding is a blue collar job these days. In fact, when I went to university they didn't teach much coding beyond a programming 101 class and you were simply expected to learn various languages on your own time. That class also certainly didn't teach you about the latest frameworks or trends either, just straight C and Java, which in hindsight I think were smart choices but at the time I didn't understand why they didn't teach more practical stuff.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  Computer science programs don't teach the latest frameworks and trends because they're teaching concepts and theory. The implementation is a side effect. That's why so many CS grads have never used git. In addition, it seems pretty obvious that with 20+ years of industry experience, a reasonably competent 40 year old candidate would be as employable as one with a degree. Who cares about university degrees that far removed from obtaining one anyway?
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Some larger companies have policies requiring degrees to become a manager or stuff like that.
    - privacypoller 9y ago
      These policies server two purposes: 1) form an easy-to-adjudicate test for filtering (yes/no) 2) reinforce the hierarchy advancement => reward structure
  - jorgeleo 9y ago
    "Computer science programs don't teach the latest frameworks and trends because they're teaching concepts and theory. The implementation is a side effect. That's why so many CS grads have never used Git." That is correct. End-user utilities like Git are left as an exercise for the student, something that a CS graduate should be able, not only to learn to use in a couple of hours, but understand its inner workings without reverse engineering, and write its own version after. The reason why Git is not tough in CS classes is that it is considered so trivial that is will be a waste of time (and tuition) to do so. "In addition, it seems pretty obvious that with 20+ years of industry experience, a reasonably competent 40 year old candidate would be as employable as one with a degree. Who cares about university degrees that far removed from obtaining one anyway?" It depends on what it will be writing; if it is another website that is just a magazine on HTML sure, no difference. If it is optimizing a compiler in assembler, correcting performance problems on a multiplatform system, or evaluating code for security holes in a sizable institution, then you better have your degree.
deleted 9y ago
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gaius 9y ago
After I decided to not go to university, but give my 110% to programming instead, I went to a coding bootcamp for 3 months in Tampa Bay, Florida Is this another success story where the secret is, be born to wealthy parents?
- _nalply 9y ago
  No, in Sweden you don't need to be rich to afford this. Perhaps the secret is, be born in Sweden.
  - andrepd 9y ago
    Globally speaking yes, she is very rich.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Wealth is relative. People in poverty in America are rich compared to global standards, but when they struggle with buying food, paying rent, or having a mode of transportation, that relatively high wealth globally doesn't really matter much.
    - gaius 9y ago
      I am English. Aged 18 could I or my parents have afforded for me to fly to America and drop $20k on an unaccredited course + more for living expenses? Not a chance. I don't want to come across as envious or anything (since I went to a good college here, before Bliar's government introduced tuition fees) but let's call a spade a spade shall we? This is someone who is highly privileged pretending that they earned it like a regular person.
      - andrepd 9y ago
        But that's precisely what I'm saying.
        gaius 9y ago
krisives 9y ago
A lot going on here if I said anything I would get torn to shreds, so I'll just smile and nod and say "cool"
- andrepd 9y ago
  Yet you opted to say nothing of value. Might was well have not said anything, if you were not going to contribute positively to the discussion.
  - krisives 9y ago
    I said “cool”
  - daxorid 9y ago
    There are plenty of people on HN who know what the parent is referring to, but simply can't comment with sentiments that belong to the class of "things you're not allowed to say". Dogwhistling is often less dangerous in terms of karma annihilation than actually expressing the thought.
deleted 9y ago
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jorgeleo 9y ago
This is a very good article, and certainly has a lot to say about being self-taught. I started developing like this but I went for the college degree after, and there is a lot to learn in academics that self-studies will not bring to your attention, so you cannot really say that you don't need to go to college if you don't know what you missed. There is coding, and there is coding. There is a huge difference between javascript and websites and embedded programming or compiler building and optimization. There is a big difference between a program that runs, and a program that runs efficiently. There is a big difference between my portfolio website and a bank customer service website. And there are many more differences if we slice software development in many other contexts.
hvidgaard 9y ago
I take a issue with her post. Let's break down her "daily life": * Streching 15m a day. * Watch online courses 2h a day. * Personal projects 4h a day. * Read 2 articles, let's go with small articles without too much techical detail, 30m in total a day. * 5 Code Wars Kata, for them to be of any value, 10m at least each, let's call it 1h a day. * Sleep is important, so we say 8 hours of sleep and at least 1 hour getting ready. This totals to 16 hours and 45 minutes. Add a commute and a work day and you are past 24 hours. And I haven't even mentioned the healthy food she wants to make - getting groceries and cooking takes time. 1 hour every day is not unreasonable either. So far this workweek needs to be less than 30 hours for her schedule to work out, probably closer to 25 hours. Lets put this into the context of a carpenter - do you expect them to spend nearly 8 hours a day of their free personal time, to improve on their trade? That is called personally funded education outside of work, and usually rewards you a title. This post, indirectly leads to stupid requirements at interviews and burnout. Some of my best developers love to code, but they know not to spend every wake moment coding or something related to coding. All developers that have called in sick or left due to a burnout all worked on, and stressed over, big personal projects to show the world. Developers need to learn the difference between work life and personal life - the former cannot be allowed to consume all available time.
- Tepix 9y ago
  She writes: "I try". Clearly she doesn't do all of these tasks every day.
  - hvidgaard 9y ago
    Why "try" to do things for 30 hours every day? It's setting yourself up for failure and burnout.
- joakimgrr 9y ago
  How I understood it is that she spends her time currently 100% learning, so instead of studying at a school she studies development on her own. This would mean that she improves her skills / trade like regular student would during a 8'ish hour school day.
kyleperik 9y ago
I'm 20 years old, and my story is pretty similar. I never wanted to go to college, because I didn't like the atmosphere and I never liked school anyways. Then I got interested in programming and basically obsessed over it and it was all I did. Then I got an internship at 17 for web development with some friends. Just recently I moved on to a larger company that I prefer more. I have enough money to support both my wife and I and more, no plans on going to college. I know college is right for some people, and statistically and practically you'll get more money. But I didn't want to throw a ton of money and 4 years of my life down a hole when you can enjoy life just fine without college.
- Tepix 9y ago
  It's spelled college.
microsuck 9y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that posing with code is really ridiculous? Seriously, I can't read a word of what you programmed there, so what's the point?
deleted 9y ago
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Accacin 9y ago
How does she find time for all that and having a job?
- danso 9y ago
  I don't find it particularly unusual when someone with a 9-5 job spends 5-6 hours at home working on their passion project. But I don't think I could have the discipline of the OP, to spend 4 hours daily on a personal project, and also completing coding exercises and reading tech articles, on a daily basis.
  - Accacin 9y ago
    True, she does say that she tries to do these things. At first I meant she does all that plus her day job.
- tfmatt 9y ago
  Questions like this rooted in reality have no place here.
jlebrech 9y ago
Being able to pick up languages and frameworks that are not garbage is a huge advantage. Being young means you can undercut on salary and live with parents, while you gain experience. Being female means you can cut out on garbage socialising sessions and be more picky.
bitwize 9y ago
Advice for a 19 year old girl and software developer, from a guy who's coming up on old coot status all too rapidly: * Subjects like ancient Greek and Latin help you build your future by giving you a better view of the past. Seeing where we've been gives us better knowledge of where we're going. * Consider university. I'm not going to tell you to go if you really don't want to, just consider it. You're in Sweden, not the USA, so higher education is free or reasonably priced and won't saddle you with crippling debt. Anything that broadens your mind and expands your horizons makes you a better developer. Science, math, philosophy, music, history, literature, art. It's worth it to learn them all, so if you decide not to go to university, set aside some time to read up on these. * Follow the old-school, BASIC-ASM-Pascal curriculum. The first language a beginning coder learned in the 80s was BASIC. This taught them to write high-level instructions for the computer. The second language they learned was assembly -- how to code in the CPU's own language, meaning you had to worry about word widths, memory locations, pointers and the like. Finally they were ready to embrace Pascal and synthesize the knowledge they got from their previous experience. They could write high-level code while remaining cognizant of low-level concepts like pointers. Modern programmers will learn JavaScript, Python, or Ruby instead of BASIC and C instead of Pascal but the principle is the same. Start high level, go really low level, and end up somewhere in the middle, able to think in terms of both abstraction and machine-level details. * Look out for your future self. Plan for her arrival; she's coming sooner than you think. When I was your age, I was chugging down Cokes and pulling all-nighters learning how to write X11 programs from the man pages. I can't keep up that lifestyle anymore. I need sleep and balance in my life otherwise I get cranky. There are lots of things I could've done then that would have given me a huge career boost now, like being more aggressive about networking and seeking out internships at major companies. Had I done that I could have been a manager or architect in my thirties. I'm still trying to make it as a developer, having to deal with an interview process and workplace environment that's tailored to people your age. * Speaking of, the workplace is tailored to people your age because the system is rigged to exploit young, enthusiastic people like you. Do you read the Bible? Matthew 10:16. You're like a sheep among wolves out there, so be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. Meaning always be honest and offer your talents in good faith, but be shrewd and know what you're up against so you don't get screwed over. Another thing I wish I'd known at your age.
- 9y ago
Chromus 9y ago
The thing that's so odd to me here is that she's giving advice as someone currently in the situation she's advising on, in fact, just embarking on this path. This article might be totally different for her if she was a 25 yo dev who skipped school, or 30 yo, etc. It's a well reasoned article, and I don't know how useful having a degree is for CS. It doesn't seem like she's in a position to have the self-awareness of her position, let alone to advise others on it.
vletrmx 9y ago
This is an impressively aware article. I do find myself wondering though, whether all this should be a requirement for entering the software industry. Why is it that software rarely seems to offer apprenticeships like other engineering disciplines?
danso 9y ago
A great post and great discussion; how is this post already off of the front page despite having ~80 votes in 1 hour? I was reading this post on my phone and missed the subhed "My daily life (outside of work)". When reading her habitual to-do list (read 2 tech articles, solve 5 CodeWars Kata) I had assumed it was her weekend list, or maybe week list. Maybe she has an extraordinary amount of energy, or maybe I've totally forgotten how much energy you could have as a teenager (or both). Something she wrote reminded me of a fragment of a story I heard on NPR about women coding: > I started coding when I was 15 years old. I had a booming health & lifestyle blog on Tumblr and gained tens of thousands of followers in no-time. This is when I started creating my own responsive layouts with the regular HTML, CSS and jQuery, as I didn’t like the themes that I could buy, so I decided to just try it myself! From there on, I kept on improving my skills, gained more knowledge, and my interest in developing grew. Here's the piece that I apparently caught a bit of on NPR: http://latinousa.org/episode/tech-industrys-leaky-pipeline/ http://latinousa.org/episode/tech-industrys-leaky-pipeline/ There's not a transcript unfortunately, but there's a bit where someone is talking about how, in the age of MySpace, kids had an opportunity to be exposed to coding because customizing MySpace profiles required writing raw HTML. Sure, it often looked ugly as hell, but we don't seem to have a similar mainstream entry point for the average Internet user to get sucked into coding -- that is, coding not for coding's sake, but just because coding was a way to improve your daily life (yes, even social media profiles count as "daily life"). IMO, the coding -- including the language that you have to figure out -- isn't important compared to the revelation that digital entities can be hacked and changed to your liking. These days, I can still impress a classroom of people by seemingly defacing nytimes.com using the web inspector. It's not the sight of HTML being typed that's impressive, but the revelation that webpages somehow are mutable. (not sure how many of those people realize that I didn't change anything on the actual nytimes.com server :p)
paulus_magnus2 9y ago
There's plenty of "coding" work that's essentially gluing frameworks together, hacking around with CSS + JS, adding one more feature to CRM. You don't need CS degree for these the same way you don't need economics degree to do basic accounting. Also if you have a degree and are in a job like this, look around. CS degree gets you open door to "real coding jobs" - AI / ML / DL - data science / BI - multithreading, performance sensitive development etc - Big Data Can you learn everything yourself / from online material. Probably yes.
commenter1 9y ago
The degree rule by me: Get one if its required to work on the field e.g. MD or if it's too hard for you to learn on your own e.g. math. Spending money you don't have on a degree you don't probably never need is silly. You can learn history, women's studies and all that jazz on your own if you only put the time in.
brailsafe 9y ago
A very level headed and motivating post. I hope she keeps the momentum going. I think there is a bit of irony however, in that while she received inquiries from recruiters in the states, without a degree she wouldn't be able to work there, or anywhere outside the European Union that doesn't have a very comfy work permit. Not that it's necessarily restricting though. I'd love to live and work where she's from. Unfortunately for the same reason, I can't. Personal Anecdote: I see a lot of myself 5 years in how she describes herself. In some ways I miss that time, in some ways not. Particularly in her attitude toward school, both secondary and post-secondary. Now though, having returned to University in Canada—for the reason I outlined above—I'm finding myself with an intense curiosity about everything unrelated to programming and love being at the University with a community of people just trying learn and do better for themselves.

97 points by carlchenet 9y ago

I live in Australia where by default, you don't have to pay for university right away (you have to pay the government back slowly once you start earning above a certain salary). As a result it's common for people to do double degrees over a long time, and universities usually don't care how long it takes you to do them. I went down the opposite path than that described in this post - into electrical engineering and math, and 5 years down the line I feel like have no practical skills (there's an emphasis on theory and the fundamentals), and feel that I'm wasting my twenties being stressed out, abusing caffeine, and pulling all nighters every week. I've been working hard on academics since I was 16 (I'm 22 now) this blog post reads like a fantasy of mine.

alexkavon 9y ago
It's a possibility, have you tried taking a few years off and testing the other methods you have in mind?
electricbanana 9y ago
On the bright side if you did electrical engineering and math in uni then you probably know a lot about matrix math and numerical and iterative approaches to solving equations that do not have elementary solutions. You might be able to apply those to graphics programming or data science.
xiphias 9y ago
If you enjoy problem solving, coding is easier than math, I wouldn't be worried about that. Also it's easy to get programming job with math / EE degree (just ask any friend of yours to give a reference). Being stressed is a much bigger problem than being a few years at academy (which is I think still a great thing, as long as it helps problem solving skills). Health is exponentially getting worse as you get older, which means that you don't feel the damage that you do to yourself under 30.

lancebeet 9y ago

It would be prudent to point out that not going to university when you are 19 isn't as much of a life-altering decision in Sweden as it is elsewhere; many choose to attend university later (when they've worked for a couple of years or when they have kids), and it's still possible to get into the top universities.

_nalply 9y ago
This is true for much of Europe I believe. Case in point: myself. Being Deaf I didn't manage University in the nineties. However I have been lucky to get a second chance at the University of Applied Sciences to graduate as an engineer, a Dipl. Ing. FH 2006. And now, 2017, I graduated as a legal, a Bachelor of Law, too, and could do this part-time. So it seems at the age of 19 it is perhaps wise not to attend university yet. So young you still don't know what you do the best.
heartbreak 9y ago
If you have a safety net (wealthy parents, personal wealth, strong social welfare), it's not really a life-altering decision anywhere.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Yeah, but I think the point is that in Sweden you don't need to have wealthy parents or personal wealth.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Same in NL, although the government support has been slimmed down a lot and it's no longer offered if you're over 30, the assumption probably being that by then you make enough money to pay for an education on your own.
  - gaius 9y ago
    ... to go and live for a few months in a foreign holiday destination while taking an expensive private course? I call shenanigans. You need to be rich for that anywhere.

danesparza 9y ago

Solid advice. I've been in this business 25 years (also didn't finish college!), and for folks just getting into software development, this is the article that will be recommended reading. Sidenote: I was surprised by the absence of a Github reference in the article. I like to follow influential devs on Github.

lecgo 9y ago

Is she a blue collar programmer?

jonheller 9y ago

I'm shocked that there's an entire mini industry of sorts of pictures of younger woman posing in front of Javascript code. Not just a casual picture but with what looks like a carefully composed photograph.

heartbreak 9y ago
Are you referring to more than just the author's Instagram photos in her post?
- jonheller 9y ago
  Yes. I mean, I still think it's kind of odd to have an entire Instagram feed of just pictures of yourself in front of code. But somehow Instagram's algorithm decided to show me tons of these types of pictures in the "Explore" tab. A huge amount were, like another commenter mentioned, girls in yoga pants or short shorts posing with Sublime Text in the background. And they're hugely popular. In no way do I think the original poster's feed is like this. She seems genuinely interested in coding. It just led me into this entire apparent subculture of this type of thing.
  - bookmarkacc 9y ago
    Your explore page is based on accounts you interact with most. So those posts are a reflection of what you are saving, liking, viewing
- deleted 9y ago
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Lon7 9y ago
I'm not at all surprised that there are women who code and want to share that with others. I'm thrilled that there is more and more of this type of stuff on Instagram. This is how we reach audiences we normally wouldn't.
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corpMaverick 9y ago

Just a word of caution. I see people in FB advocating against college and academic knowledge in general. (E.g. Einstein flunk math(not true), Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish College, etc.) Sure, If you are really, really smart like Gates, Zuckerberg, or Micheal Dell and you have a killer idea. Don't waste your time in college. But for most moderately smart people college is the best choice. Also if high school was too hard for you, and you don't like school any way, don't waste your time in college and learn a trade. This woman seems very mature and motivated. She is growing without going to college. So it may be the right choice for her. But it will not be the right choice for most people.

jonathanstrange 9y ago
I'd like to add to this another word of advice. I'm only a hobby/shareware programmer with no experience in the software industry and it also depends on the country, but generally speaking in many countries and many professions not having an official degree can mean less long-term career chances and a risk of earning less money than less competent colleagues with fancy degrees for the rest of your life. My general advice is to get a good degree for your dream job and to work on a portfolio that illustrates that you're also practically good at it at the same time. Don't fall prey to the false dichotomy trap.
gr3yh47 9y ago
>But for most moderately smart people college is the best choice. I just don't think this is true anymore, given the financial burden of modern academic education and the fact that they teach so little useful skills programming is increasingly a trade, and can definitely be self taught better than any college will teach it. the rest of the education may have other value but IMO not worth the time + money + opportunity cost
- emodendroket 9y ago
  The value of a college education isn't purely economic, but the salaries of graduates are still, in aggregate, higher than those of non-graduates.

Lon7 9y ago

I think an important thing your average non-cs grad developer can learn from her story is the importance of networking. Maybe networking isn't the quite the correct term. But she put herself out there starting at 15, wrote and shared what she did. I'm sure she made a lot of contacts, even if only through the internet. She created an image for herself. Without that there is nothing to set you apart from everyone else in your situation. So it's not surprising that she had multiple recruiters reaching out to her during bootcamp. Good for her.

peterwwillis 9y ago

I followed pretty much an identical path 14 years ago. Here's what I've learned. Yes, she's right that you don't need a lot of school to develop the trade skills of programming or other tech work, and people will hire you. However, it can easily replace the time when young people normally used to develop social skills and potentially critical future relationships (personal and professional). It's also easy to fall down the rabbit hole of learning as much as you can about technology and abandon all other pursuits, because you no longer have the outside influences found in a traditional education system. This limits your exposure to alternative ways of thinking, which at the very least limits effectiveness in your career (a creative one) to say nothing of stunting personal growth. My biggest regret is not learning more about the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Myceneans and Minoans, and Egyptians and Chinese, when their foundational achievements could have inspired me in both my personal and professional life. Learning languages is great too as it exposes new kinds of culture and different ways of thinking. I'm not saying this is a bad path to take - it worked for me! - but I wish someone would have told me all the things I was missing, or provided some sort of path to experience the rewarding parts of it.

jlebrech 9y ago
you can learn about greeks and romans quite easily in your spare time, they wrote a lot of books.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  Yes, I've been aware of that for a long time, but thank you for the information.

matte_black 9y ago

When deciding whether or not you should go to college, always look at the big picture and weigh your options. The kind of work you do in your early twenties probably doesn't require a college education or a strong network of college educated peers, so initially it will seem like you are getting by just fine. But what about your 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond? No one needs to go to college for coding because coding is a blue collar job these days. In fact, when I went to university they didn't teach much coding beyond a programming 101 class and you were simply expected to learn various languages on your own time. That class also certainly didn't teach you about the latest frameworks or trends either, just straight C and Java, which in hindsight I think were smart choices but at the time I didn't understand why they didn't teach more practical stuff.

heartbreak 9y ago
Computer science programs don't teach the latest frameworks and trends because they're teaching concepts and theory. The implementation is a side effect. That's why so many CS grads have never used git. In addition, it seems pretty obvious that with 20+ years of industry experience, a reasonably competent 40 year old candidate would be as employable as one with a degree. Who cares about university degrees that far removed from obtaining one anyway?
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Some larger companies have policies requiring degrees to become a manager or stuff like that.
  - privacypoller 9y ago
    These policies server two purposes: 1) form an easy-to-adjudicate test for filtering (yes/no) 2) reinforce the hierarchy advancement => reward structure
- jorgeleo 9y ago
  "Computer science programs don't teach the latest frameworks and trends because they're teaching concepts and theory. The implementation is a side effect. That's why so many CS grads have never used Git." That is correct. End-user utilities like Git are left as an exercise for the student, something that a CS graduate should be able, not only to learn to use in a couple of hours, but understand its inner workings without reverse engineering, and write its own version after. The reason why Git is not tough in CS classes is that it is considered so trivial that is will be a waste of time (and tuition) to do so. "In addition, it seems pretty obvious that with 20+ years of industry experience, a reasonably competent 40 year old candidate would be as employable as one with a degree. Who cares about university degrees that far removed from obtaining one anyway?" It depends on what it will be writing; if it is another website that is just a magazine on HTML sure, no difference. If it is optimizing a compiler in assembler, correcting performance problems on a multiplatform system, or evaluating code for security holes in a sizable institution, then you better have your degree.

deleted 9y ago

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gaius 9y ago

After I decided to not go to university, but give my 110% to programming instead, I went to a coding bootcamp for 3 months in Tampa Bay, Florida Is this another success story where the secret is, be born to wealthy parents?

_nalply 9y ago
No, in Sweden you don't need to be rich to afford this. Perhaps the secret is, be born in Sweden.
- andrepd 9y ago
  Globally speaking yes, she is very rich.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Wealth is relative. People in poverty in America are rich compared to global standards, but when they struggle with buying food, paying rent, or having a mode of transportation, that relatively high wealth globally doesn't really matter much.
  - gaius 9y ago
    I am English. Aged 18 could I or my parents have afforded for me to fly to America and drop $20k on an unaccredited course + more for living expenses? Not a chance. I don't want to come across as envious or anything (since I went to a good college here, before Bliar's government introduced tuition fees) but let's call a spade a spade shall we? This is someone who is highly privileged pretending that they earned it like a regular person.
    - andrepd 9y ago
      But that's precisely what I'm saying.
      - gaius 9y ago

krisives 9y ago

A lot going on here if I said anything I would get torn to shreds, so I'll just smile and nod and say "cool"

andrepd 9y ago
Yet you opted to say nothing of value. Might was well have not said anything, if you were not going to contribute positively to the discussion.
- krisives 9y ago
  I said “cool”
- daxorid 9y ago
  There are plenty of people on HN who know what the parent is referring to, but simply can't comment with sentiments that belong to the class of "things you're not allowed to say". Dogwhistling is often less dangerous in terms of karma annihilation than actually expressing the thought.

deleted 9y ago

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jorgeleo 9y ago

This is a very good article, and certainly has a lot to say about being self-taught. I started developing like this but I went for the college degree after, and there is a lot to learn in academics that self-studies will not bring to your attention, so you cannot really say that you don't need to go to college if you don't know what you missed. There is coding, and there is coding. There is a huge difference between javascript and websites and embedded programming or compiler building and optimization. There is a big difference between a program that runs, and a program that runs efficiently. There is a big difference between my portfolio website and a bank customer service website. And there are many more differences if we slice software development in many other contexts.

hvidgaard 9y ago

I take a issue with her post. Let's break down her "daily life": * Streching 15m a day. * Watch online courses 2h a day. * Personal projects 4h a day. * Read 2 articles, let's go with small articles without too much techical detail, 30m in total a day. * 5 Code Wars Kata, for them to be of any value, 10m at least each, let's call it 1h a day. * Sleep is important, so we say 8 hours of sleep and at least 1 hour getting ready. This totals to 16 hours and 45 minutes. Add a commute and a work day and you are past 24 hours. And I haven't even mentioned the healthy food she wants to make - getting groceries and cooking takes time. 1 hour every day is not unreasonable either. So far this workweek needs to be less than 30 hours for her schedule to work out, probably closer to 25 hours. Lets put this into the context of a carpenter - do you expect them to spend nearly 8 hours a day of their free personal time, to improve on their trade? That is called personally funded education outside of work, and usually rewards you a title. This post, indirectly leads to stupid requirements at interviews and burnout. Some of my best developers love to code, but they know not to spend every wake moment coding or something related to coding. All developers that have called in sick or left due to a burnout all worked on, and stressed over, big personal projects to show the world. Developers need to learn the difference between work life and personal life - the former cannot be allowed to consume all available time.

Tepix 9y ago
She writes: "I try". Clearly she doesn't do all of these tasks every day.
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  Why "try" to do things for 30 hours every day? It's setting yourself up for failure and burnout.
joakimgrr 9y ago
How I understood it is that she spends her time currently 100% learning, so instead of studying at a school she studies development on her own. This would mean that she improves her skills / trade like regular student would during a 8'ish hour school day.

kyleperik 9y ago

I'm 20 years old, and my story is pretty similar. I never wanted to go to college, because I didn't like the atmosphere and I never liked school anyways. Then I got interested in programming and basically obsessed over it and it was all I did. Then I got an internship at 17 for web development with some friends. Just recently I moved on to a larger company that I prefer more. I have enough money to support both my wife and I and more, no plans on going to college. I know college is right for some people, and statistically and practically you'll get more money. But I didn't want to throw a ton of money and 4 years of my life down a hole when you can enjoy life just fine without college.

Tepix 9y ago
It's spelled college.

microsuck 9y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that posing with code is really ridiculous? Seriously, I can't read a word of what you programmed there, so what's the point?

deleted 9y ago

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Accacin 9y ago

How does she find time for all that and having a job?

danso 9y ago
I don't find it particularly unusual when someone with a 9-5 job spends 5-6 hours at home working on their passion project. But I don't think I could have the discipline of the OP, to spend 4 hours daily on a personal project, and also completing coding exercises and reading tech articles, on a daily basis.
- Accacin 9y ago
  True, she does say that she tries to do these things. At first I meant she does all that plus her day job.
tfmatt 9y ago
Questions like this rooted in reality have no place here.

jlebrech 9y ago

Being able to pick up languages and frameworks that are not garbage is a huge advantage. Being young means you can undercut on salary and live with parents, while you gain experience. Being female means you can cut out on garbage socialising sessions and be more picky.

bitwize 9y ago

Advice for a 19 year old girl and software developer, from a guy who's coming up on old coot status all too rapidly: * Subjects like ancient Greek and Latin help you build your future by giving you a better view of the past. Seeing where we've been gives us better knowledge of where we're going. * Consider university. I'm not going to tell you to go if you really don't want to, just consider it. You're in Sweden, not the USA, so higher education is free or reasonably priced and won't saddle you with crippling debt. Anything that broadens your mind and expands your horizons makes you a better developer. Science, math, philosophy, music, history, literature, art. It's worth it to learn them all, so if you decide not to go to university, set aside some time to read up on these. * Follow the old-school, BASIC-ASM-Pascal curriculum. The first language a beginning coder learned in the 80s was BASIC. This taught them to write high-level instructions for the computer. The second language they learned was assembly -- how to code in the CPU's own language, meaning you had to worry about word widths, memory locations, pointers and the like. Finally they were ready to embrace Pascal and synthesize the knowledge they got from their previous experience. They could write high-level code while remaining cognizant of low-level concepts like pointers. Modern programmers will learn JavaScript, Python, or Ruby instead of BASIC and C instead of Pascal but the principle is the same. Start high level, go really low level, and end up somewhere in the middle, able to think in terms of both abstraction and machine-level details. * Look out for your future self. Plan for her arrival; she's coming sooner than you think. When I was your age, I was chugging down Cokes and pulling all-nighters learning how to write X11 programs from the man pages. I can't keep up that lifestyle anymore. I need sleep and balance in my life otherwise I get cranky. There are lots of things I could've done then that would have given me a huge career boost now, like being more aggressive about networking and seeking out internships at major companies. Had I done that I could have been a manager or architect in my thirties. I'm still trying to make it as a developer, having to deal with an interview process and workplace environment that's tailored to people your age. * Speaking of, the workplace is tailored to people your age because the system is rigged to exploit young, enthusiastic people like you. Do you read the Bible? Matthew 10:16. You're like a sheep among wolves out there, so be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. Meaning always be honest and offer your talents in good faith, but be shrewd and know what you're up against so you don't get screwed over. Another thing I wish I'd known at your age.

9y ago

Chromus 9y ago

The thing that's so odd to me here is that she's giving advice as someone currently in the situation she's advising on, in fact, just embarking on this path. This article might be totally different for her if she was a 25 yo dev who skipped school, or 30 yo, etc. It's a well reasoned article, and I don't know how useful having a degree is for CS. It doesn't seem like she's in a position to have the self-awareness of her position, let alone to advise others on it.

vletrmx 9y ago

This is an impressively aware article. I do find myself wondering though, whether all this should be a requirement for entering the software industry. Why is it that software rarely seems to offer apprenticeships like other engineering disciplines?

danso 9y ago

A great post and great discussion; how is this post already off of the front page despite having ~80 votes in 1 hour? I was reading this post on my phone and missed the subhed "My daily life (outside of work)". When reading her habitual to-do list (read 2 tech articles, solve 5 CodeWars Kata) I had assumed it was her weekend list, or maybe week list. Maybe she has an extraordinary amount of energy, or maybe I've totally forgotten how much energy you could have as a teenager (or both). Something she wrote reminded me of a fragment of a story I heard on NPR about women coding: > I started coding when I was 15 years old. I had a booming health & lifestyle blog on Tumblr and gained tens of thousands of followers in no-time. This is when I started creating my own responsive layouts with the regular HTML, CSS and jQuery, as I didn’t like the themes that I could buy, so I decided to just try it myself! From there on, I kept on improving my skills, gained more knowledge, and my interest in developing grew. Here's the piece that I apparently caught a bit of on NPR: http://latinousa.org/episode/tech-industrys-leaky-pipeline/ http://latinousa.org/episode/tech-industrys-leaky-pipeline/ There's not a transcript unfortunately, but there's a bit where someone is talking about how, in the age of MySpace, kids had an opportunity to be exposed to coding because customizing MySpace profiles required writing raw HTML. Sure, it often looked ugly as hell, but we don't seem to have a similar mainstream entry point for the average Internet user to get sucked into coding -- that is, coding not for coding's sake, but just because coding was a way to improve your daily life (yes, even social media profiles count as "daily life"). IMO, the coding -- including the language that you have to figure out -- isn't important compared to the revelation that digital entities can be hacked and changed to your liking. These days, I can still impress a classroom of people by seemingly defacing nytimes.com using the web inspector. It's not the sight of HTML being typed that's impressive, but the revelation that webpages somehow are mutable. (not sure how many of those people realize that I didn't change anything on the actual nytimes.com server :p)

paulus_magnus2 9y ago

There's plenty of "coding" work that's essentially gluing frameworks together, hacking around with CSS + JS, adding one more feature to CRM. You don't need CS degree for these the same way you don't need economics degree to do basic accounting. Also if you have a degree and are in a job like this, look around. CS degree gets you open door to "real coding jobs" - AI / ML / DL - data science / BI - multithreading, performance sensitive development etc - Big Data Can you learn everything yourself / from online material. Probably yes.

commenter1 9y ago

The degree rule by me: Get one if its required to work on the field e.g. MD or if it's too hard for you to learn on your own e.g. math. Spending money you don't have on a degree you don't probably never need is silly. You can learn history, women's studies and all that jazz on your own if you only put the time in.

brailsafe 9y ago

A very level headed and motivating post. I hope she keeps the momentum going. I think there is a bit of irony however, in that while she received inquiries from recruiters in the states, without a degree she wouldn't be able to work there, or anywhere outside the European Union that doesn't have a very comfy work permit. Not that it's necessarily restricting though. I'd love to live and work where she's from. Unfortunately for the same reason, I can't. Personal Anecdote: I see a lot of myself 5 years in how she describes herself. In some ways I miss that time, in some ways not. Particularly in her attitude toward school, both secondary and post-secondary. Now though, having returned to University in Canada—for the reason I outlined above—I'm finding myself with an intense curiosity about everything unrelated to programming and love being at the University with a community of people just trying learn and do better for themselves.